general questions about 7.0 and computer efficiency......
Steve Franks
stevefranks at ieee.org
Wed Aug 13 21:31:06 UTC 2008
On Wed, Aug 13, 2008 at 1:56 PM, Gary Kline <kline at thought.org> wrote:
> On Tue, Aug 12, 2008 at 11:52:38PM +0100, Chris Whitehouse wrote:
>> Gary Kline wrote:
>> >On Tue, Aug 12, 2008 at 12:46:56AM +0100, Chris Whitehouse wrote:
>> >>Hi Gary
>> >>
>> > Do you build your hardware from the tower case up? ---Green is
>> > "in" these days; so maybe some of us, or each of us, can
>> > contribute to a best-of list for those who are going to find a
>> > local builder or roll their own. First time I'll be in an "in"
>> > group :-)
>>
>> Yep, any old crap case found on the street will do. With a little care
>> building modern hardware is _really_ easy, it's very hard to mess up as
>> there is only a handful of parts and most things that plug into other
>> things can only do so one way and things that aren't supposed to plug
>> into each other mostly can't. Power supplies provide instant protection,
>> ie won't turn on when there is a problem. My computer has one each of
>> motherboard, hard drive, power supply, optical drive and cpu, plus 2 ram
>> modules and a few cables.
>
>>
>> The time consuming part is researching the parts. If you are building
>> servers you might have to dig even deeper, eg
>> http://www.worlds-fastest.com/d.pdf/wfw991.pdf
>>
>
> I have one firewall running pfSense. It stands guard between my
> modem and my internal server. I don't understand why the pfSense
> box has two NIC's and the mail/web/DNS has only one, but that's
> how my LAN guy reconfigured things.
>
> one thing I'm thinking of is to get One fast and lower-power server,
> having two jails. One jail would be as-is with mail/web/DNS and the
> other jail would be "tao", my main server for years. When I buy
> a reasonably fast ThinkPad, it could run Ubuntu and I could
> reconfigure my older boxen for emergencies.
>
>> >
>> > Not that bad if you've got only one box. My Ubuntu is a bear to
>> > reboot, sometimes, because the mouse goes nuts every other
>> > reboot.
>>
>> Do you mean it's not that bad that one computer uses 130 instead of 95.
>> I think that is critical to the problem. To think about climate change
>> you have to multiply your negligible contribution by the total number of
>> negligible contributions. Manufacturers are not interested in 'green' so
>> we have to do it for ourselves.
>
>
> They are finally waking up! Especially as their own costs
> skyrocket, and as the poor consumers {that's us} start yelping as
> our power bills hit the ceiling. It will be at least a few years
> though, so for now, yes, it's our responsibility.
>
>
>> I have to say it was a bit painful
>> spending £50 on an energy efficient power supply instead of £15 on a
>> standard one, but the other parts aren't any more expensive.
>>
>> I'll redo my measurements in the next couple of days.
>>
>> >
>> >>It's a good idea to turn computers off at the wall when not using them
>> >>not just shut them down. I was surprised to find mine uses about 25
>> >>watts when shut down. Again the Dells at work use even more. The
>> >>corporate environment must waste so many megawatts...
>
>
> And of course these costs are passed along. Borne by not only
> the consumer but by the planet. ....
>
>
>
>> >>
>> >>For servers my workplace is heading towards fewer physical machines and
>> >>running virtual servers to implement their 'green ICT' policy.
>> >>
>> >>It's great to hear that someone else is thinking about the environmental
>> >>effects.
>> >
>> >
>> >
>> > I've been thinking about my footprint ever since talking to a
>> > friend up in Ottawa who was looking into building a hay-bail
>> > home. This is [tiny] green [/tiny]. Hay-bail insulation is
>> > [HUGE] Green [/HUGE]. I told him I was going to buy some land
>> > north of Nome and plant palm trees!
>>
>> I've just come back from the climate camp at Kingsnorth in UK :)
>>
>> Sorry getting OT again but I do think energy use is an issue that we
>> should be addressing and has to be addressed on an individual basis.
>
>
> The way I see it, since we {us-[BSD]-geeks} are among the most
> savvy folk on the planet, it's make sense for us to be in the
> lead on this type of issue. [volumes left unsaid]
>
> gary
>
> PS: just spent 20 minutes crawling around beneath desk. my
> bare-bones ubuntu draws between 100 -- 107w. isling.
>
>
>
>>
>> Chris
>>
>> >
>> > gary
>> >
>> >
>> >>Chris
>> >>
>> >
>>
>
> --
> Gary Kline kline at thought.org http://www.thought.org Public Service Unix
> http://jottings.thought.org http://transfinite.thought.org
>
>
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>
Good to see some attention paid to this subject. I complained about a
year ago about the poor support in freebsd for ataidle, and I got
several replies somewhere between indifference, and outright flames,
and this from Europeans, who are regarded as somewhat more enlightened
on the subject...
My server has about 6 disks in it, in several raid configurations, and
they're all 7200 or 10k rpm drives, so disk power usage is paramount
for me. A good deal of things (i.e. CVS!) choke bigtime when a disk
is spun down and they attempt to acess it. Apache used to timeout,
but lately, it seems to just wait patently for the disk to spin up
then load the page - I will hope this was deliberate...in the
meantime, I should probably be on SVN instead of CVS anyway. I still
see lots of ugliness in dmesg regarding the disks, but everything
seems to function, and I haven't lost any data or commits...
Best,
Steve
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